National Post (National Edition)
Cutting council down to size is a fine start
Ford’s proposal for Toronto stops some gravy
The sound of heads exploding, the righteous pops of indignation, the howls of shock — my good God, I can’t remember a better morning.
I refer, of course, to the surprise announcement Friday from Premier Doug Ford that the Ontario government will soon propose legislation to cut the size of Toronto city council by almost half. Word of the change leaked out Thursday night (a magnificent scoop by Robert Benzie of the Toronto Star), so before Ford had even made it official, Toronto Mayor John Tory and various city councillors, provincial politicians and reporters were showing up on TV screens, sputtering and muttering about the alleged affront to democracy.
Anyone who has suffered the interminable, unbearable nonsense that passes for municipal government in the country’s biggest city knows an affront to democracy when she sees one, and it ain’t what Ford did.
The premier called Toronto City Hall “the most dysfunctional political arena in the country” and right he was.
I was exiled once to city hall as a columnist-cum-bureau chief for the Toronto Sun. I believe I was there two years but it felt like 10.
Even then, and this was in the mid-to-late 1990s, council meetings occasionally went on for days, though at that time it was usually just over two. This week, the council meeting lasted five days, from Monday (when the start was adjourned out of respect for the victims of the Danforth shooting) through Thursday (when some councillors had lunch on the Danforth to show the city was carrying on) to Friday (it was still going on late in the day as councillors discussed the Ford surprise).
Five days!
That’s with 44 councillors, not the 47 that the number would have swelled to come the Oct. 22 election with three new or re-made wards — until Ford blew it all up and said he’d reduce the number to 25. Council is simply too big, and councillors too focused on making their voices heard, to be able to function efficiently.
This isn’t to say there weren’t and aren’t councillors who work hard. Of course there are, and it’s a mind-numbing 24/7 job.
It involves dealing with all manner of petty complaints from constituents, endless committee meetings and evening and weekend rounds of public appearances (from local festivals to various meetings of community groups to BBQs). All the money in the world wouldn’t be enough to make me want to walk that plank.
In my long-ago time at city hall, I came to prefer the committee meetings where, with a smaller and more manageable group, things actually got done and you could tell the serious councillors who had a grip on the file from the lightweights and the grandstanders.
But I understand Ford’s visceral sense — from his one term on council, this while his late brother Rob was the mayor — that things often stalled in the muck of performance art, that the wool was being pulled over his eyes, and that money was being wasted but he just couldn’t penetrate the bureaucracy well or deep enough to find it. “Stop the Gravy Train” was Rob Ford’s slogan and if neither he nor his big brother was ever able to quite find the gravy, like them, I suspect it’s nonetheless there.
As an excellent current illustration, I give you a searing report on the state of fire safety in city buildings.
It was written by city auditor-general Beverly Romeo-Beehler, and it exposed waste, duplicity, gross mismanagement and argu- ably even fraud in a city department, the Facilities Management division, which had gone on for a decade.
At bottom, the AG found a trio of suspicious companies, all related and run by the same man, which bragged of fake fire inspectors and used fake employees to win city contracts and taxpayer dollars. Facilities Management had so little by way of a paper trail that the brass had no real idea if the billed-for work had ever been done or if their buildings were actually safe.
Worse, underlings in the department had repeatedly blown the whistle on all this, and complained to their bosses about the companies’ shoddy work and practices but were steadfastly and repeatedly ignored.
The AG couldn’t prove fraud, because the records were so bad, but she sure as hell suspected it and said so. Toronto police couldn’t even launch a fraud investigation because of the woeful state of the inspection trail.
The report went first to the audit committee, where councillors were aghast, and asked smart, probing questions.
The answers they got from a senior staffer were disingenuous and deflective, and despite the AG and a deputy fire chief directly contradicting her, she appears to have survived.
That report, important and troubling, was on the council agenda for Monday. It finally made it to the floor of council Thursday, where it was approved, more money thrown at it (including to the senior staffer to use to hire a third party to audit the state of fire safety in city buildings, the very problem she and her minions ignored), with minimal discussion and no fuss at all.
It got no real attention, not in a “thoughts and prayers” and “assault-on-democracy” week.
That’s the sort of thing, the very gravy train, I suspect Rob Ford, who was around city hall a long time, knew in his bones was happening, but could never prove.
If his brother remembered that this week, when he decided to cut city council numbers, good on him.